An incorrigible Cognitive Dissident

Smoke Signals

Dutch Auction. The Netherlands having just nationalised the fourth-largest Dutch mortgage lender SNS minutes before it imploded, there is word from mainland Europe that this could be the start of something big.

French lender Credit Agricole announced a whopping impairment this morning, not long after Deutsche Bank suffered a €2.2bn quarterly loss yesterday. CreditAg says it’ll write down the value of goodwill on its balance sheet by €2.7bn.

Much of this vindicates the predictions of distinguished author Gary B. Gorton. He argues that most post-mortems of the recent financial crisis failed to recognise the culpability of what he calls “the shadow banking system”, and new-fangled forms of debt.

Ace US trader Butch writes on this one, “If the Dutch had had derivatives and the ECB back during Tulip mania, no losses would have been realized, and we would still be kicking the can”. Quite so.

Scamming the DWP. There may yet be life after all among the mainstream meeja hacks. Word reaches Slogger’s Roost that the private sector’s outrageous ripping off of the taxpayers’ attempts to get desperate people back to work is to be full-frontally exposed by a major media provider this weekend. Think McAlpine victims, and you shall not be far wrong.

La Dolce Vita. The Monte dei Paschi di Siena (MPS) scandal will go beyond Italian affairs in the end. With a general election only weeks away, Silvio Berlusconi looks like being the main winner from the political spat. The former prime minister’s camp has attacked Pierluigi Bersani’s Democratic Party, which is leading in the opinion polls, for being close to Monte dei Paschi (MPS). It has also criticised Mario Monti, the current prime minister, who agreed to increase MPS’s bailout to 3.9 billion euros.

But disturbingly under the spotlight is Mario Draghi, if only because the ECB president ran the Bank of Italy when MPS was getting into such a mess. Giulio Tremonti, who was finance minister in Berlusconi’s last government, tweeted that it was “stupefying” that Draghi had failed to discover or prevent the complex transactions.

17 thoughts on “Smoke Signals”

Not sure why I’m dignifying your very odd post with a reply, but anyway…

What JW is doing here is called journalism, and he does it exceptionally well. I for one would be lost without his blog.

As to your comment about “one way conversation” – would you make the same comment to a journalist in the paper press? It would be a lot more justified there than here, where you surely can’t have failed to notice the numerous replies to JW, which are mostly a lot more worth reading than yours was!

The Pindown child abuse victims have been deliberatly criminalised to try to justify the abuse, “THEY WERE NO ANGELS” is what I remember of one of the local newspaper describing us. I cant remember which one, its been taken down online now, covered up, as has been the Allan Levy QC/Barbara Kehen government pindown report.
The benefits system is a minefield. No-one seems to understand it and I remember those horrible threatening adverts BENEFIT FRAUD, the trouble is, because the rules are so complicated if you are ill its a struggle to even fill them in, and an absolute nightmare for mentally ill people, who just end up getting demonised instead of helped.
I was told to apply for DLA because of my mental health problems, the woman from the benefits agency was very kind to me, not the job centre people who kept making me go to near whene I was abused and made me talk about being raped on the Job Bus with the doors open so all the other people could hear it, but the welfare lady, but I was too scared to in case the secret family courts used it as an excuse to persecute our family all over again by making out I am a bad mother. I try my best to be a good mother but no-one is perfect, no matter how hard you try. I do the dinners and make the house and clothes clean and help with homework and try to be a good listener and basically try my best, to put my problems aside and be giving and loving. But I live in terror inside of me, not a day goes by without me feeling terror, because the Pindown persecution is unfinished business. I know that the paedophiles would absolutly love to blasken my name and get me for something, no matter how trivial, and the thought makes me feel sick inside of me. I just live in fear most of the time and sometimes it spills out and I have an episode, it is like falling down a mineshaft when I do, very very scary.

Well we know that DWP are willing to pay an incentive wage to anyone claiming to be an employer that takes on anyone who is 16-24 and disabled and is offering his labour freely using the work program . By offering freely I mean mandated.
You can get paid over 2 grand a week ..providing the ’employee’ works thirty hours plus. Something for nothing . Ker ching.

‘Draghi had failed to discover or prevent the complex transactions.’
Oh, he discovered them alright but, in true banker fashion ignored them because, who was going to do anything about it? Answer: Nobody. And, you what? Nobody is still not going to do anything about it. Draghi could put an end to The Dream in an instant with his knowledge of the underhanded, illegal goings on. He is a safe as houses. He knows far too much to come under any pressure from any ‘culpability’ much the same as all the Spanish scumbags taking backhanders.
All swimming in the same cesspit and all preventing any one sinking for fear of exposure.